It’s quite ironic, really. If you had asked me what I wanted to be when I was five, I probably would have said ‘police officer’ or ‘astronaut’, something exciting or eventful. Now I’m sitting here writing to you as an English major. Not really something that leads to too much excitement. And yet, I couldn’t care less. I’ll make my own excitement while I do what I love. It’s weird looking back on how I got here.

When I was in Elementary and Middle school I was behind. I had to be taken out of class sometimes to be brought into a room with other kids like me who had, what the system called, a ‘learning difference’. During this time I didn’t read beyond what was assigned and I certainly didn’t write unless I had too. Now that’s all I do out of my own will. What a change of pace!

In my junior year of high school, I struggled a lot with what I wanted to study in college, since it was on the horizon. It was so easy to know what you wanted back then, when you were just getting the hang of talking and you were desperately trying to keep up with all the towering adults walking in such big strides. You wanted to play and have adventures and that’s what you thought adults did so why not do what they do? But high school came, and not only did I realize that’s not what they did, but also I didn’t want to do what they did.

I still wanted to have adventures, but that doesn’t exactly pay well, now does it? I suppose that’s why I like playing video games, and reading comics and books. They present something to me that’s whimsical and relatively cheap (I could say the same thing about drugs but that’s different). You can travel to any world and still somehow be sitting in your bedroom, in that bean bag chair that you got at a garage sale, from the old lady down the street. You don’t know why she had it. It’s quite evident that she had a bad back, and no doubt, she wouldn’t have been able to sit in it without having problems. But it was five bucks and now you can enjoy it yourself, with your perfectly fine back. You can watch and read to your hearts content without having to worry about your old chair breaking as you shake the nails lose from the frame while you bob your leg at that particularly exciting part of your book. But I digress. I like to experience things, even if it means reading or watching about it.

It wasn’t exactly easy making my decision at first because, unlike in my childhood, this time I had to actually make a good one! What I did was take the safe route. That was Criminal Justice. I wanted to be an officer for a while, it definitely sounded interesting, and it made good money so that’s why I chose it. Then, after a year, I thought about what I was passionate about. I joined the literary magazine at my university, Mercyhurst, and signed up for a creative writing class. These made things clearly evident to me (Well, I had liked writing stories since high school, so it was evident for a while, but it became more so in the fall of 2016). Then came the spring of 2017, I had finally grown the spine I needed to change majors. It scared me that I wanted to write for a living because the hardest thing to make it as is an artist. Then one day I was listening to my music and I came across a song by Watsky called ‘Never Let it Die”. Here is an excerpt:

“my father was telling me that I better be ready to ride on through
'Cause I know that it's tough, but it's gotta be somebody, so then why not you?”

All I want to do is write stories. I find it enthralling to be able to make a world through only your words. To be able to weave a tale that may captivate someone else is a dream I hope comes to a reality. But since it’s harder to break into the publishing industry than pulling the sword from the stone, and I want a steady income when I get out of college, I have decided to get into the editing business and work my way into publishing. While this happens, earning a steady income, I’ll be writing stories to hopefully get published.

If I had the opportunity to go back and tell my younger-self anything, it would be, although cliché, to follow your dreams because that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m following them and putting them on paper.